In Illinois, the University of Illinois says poor ethanol plant margins, plants idling production, and continued haggling over small refinery exemptions provide the background for ethanol production moving into the 2019-20 marketing year. Corn use for ethanol production during the 2019-20 marketing looks set to recover slightly from the weak levels seen during the 2018-19 […]
In Illinois, University of Illinois chemical engineers have assessed the technical and economic feasibility of a new electrolysis technology that uses a cheap biofuel byproduct to reduce the energy consumption of the waste-to-value process by 53 percent. The new findings are published in the journal Nature Energy. The new study proposes glycerol—an organic byproduct of […]
In Illinois, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Crops in silico (Cis) project has received a $5 million grant from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) to continue building a computational platform that integrates multiple models to study a whole plant virtually. Developing crops using traditional methods is research, labor and cost intensive. However, Cisallows researchers […]
In Illinois, for farmers, Miscanthus represents a big up-front investment. The large perennial grass must be established from vegetative pieces at great cost to farmers, but it promises a decade or more of massive biomass yields, starting in year two or three. If a cold winter happens to strike in the first year, however, all […]
Regardless of your age, you’ve probably heard of the search for the Holy Grail, or at the very least watched Monty Python’s movie, “Holy Grail.” And while everyone is probably searching for their own holy grail, scientists in Illinois may have just gotten incredibly close to finding the treasure that any crop producer has been […]
In Illinois, a new study from the University of Illinois shows that the unobtrusive perennial vine native to Australia, called Glycine tomentella, could hold the key to substantially increase soybean yields. “We saw yield increases of 3.5 to 7 bushels per acre in soybean lines derived from crossing with Glycine tomentella,” said Randall Nelson, study […]
In Illinois, with feed costs and the worldwide demand for meat growing, livestock producers are increasingly turning to co-products from the ethanol and human food industries. Research from the University of Illinois is helping to determine the feed value of wheat middlings and red dog, two co-products of the wheat milling process that can be […]
In Illinois, researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign are using adding calcium to different corn byproducts and tweaking the solution’s pH in an effort to precipitate organic and inorganic phosphorus compounds in minutes. Doing so would not only create potential additional value using the phosphorus as fertilizer or as supplements for animal feed but […]
In Illinois, a new study from the University of Illinois analyzes why the gap between the ethanol blend wall and the conventional ethanol mandate is so important to understanding the movement of ethanol RINs prices, how the gap is rapidly shrinking, and what this means for the future ethanol RINs price levels. The report said […]
In Illinois, a multi-institution report provides practical agronomic data for five cellulosic feedstocks, which could improve adoption and increase production across the country. The project, backed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Sun Grant Initiative, began in 2008 and includes researchers from 26 institutions. Together, they evaluated the bioenergy potential of switchgrass, Miscanthus, […]
